Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 278.
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        Date: 2025-12-31 08:49:22+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: Satie and ChatGPT

In "Satie's Spell", The New York Review of Books 73.1 (15/1/26), Jeremy
Denk comments as follows on Eric Satie's musical language:

> This language is inimitable—and also retreats from authorship. The
> music, rotating through its enigmatic ideas, evokes AI chatbots when
> their algorithms have run out of primary thoughts and begin to cycle
> through plausible tautologies. ChatGPT confesses its lack of
> intentionality: “I, as an AI don’t have: Desires, Goals, Inner
> states, Intentional consciousness”—as it happens, a near exact list
> of the things that Satie was trying to purge from music. I asked
> ChatGPT to explore this parallel further. “Like Satie’s music,” it
> responded, “what I produce can: 1) Resist depth in the Romantic
> sense; 2) Be read as a mirror rather than a window; 3) Feel alien or
> emotionally ambiguous.” That was remarkably good, and I didn’t know
> if my prompt had “created” it, what amount of authorship I still
> possessed, or if I should care—yet more layers of Satie.

Happy New Year! -- a bit in advance.

Best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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